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I remember when most Americans most of the time lived in a world of predictable events, stable relationships, and reasonable expectations for the future. Well, our worlds are mostly not so stable anymore. That, after all, is what much of the current political turbulence is all about. Everyone seeks the novelty of interesting things, but not if they interfere with the stability of our everyday lives.

In 2016, fed-up with the self-serving political stagnation and corruption, voters decided to try an “outsider.” Had the Democratic Party nomination process been democratic, they might have chosen an independent predictably moral grandfather figure. But an inveterate real estate huckster effectively conned them into picking the brash disrupter over a corporate insider.

Never mind the fact that she won the popular vote; never mind the voter suppression, never mind gerrymandering; never mind Russian trolls. Resentment of stagnation and corruption of the political process drove many angry voters, as Michael Moore put it, to throw a political “Molotov cocktail” into the arena.

Even in these turbulent times, when the lives of so many have destabilized, we tend to see the institutional world out there as a given. Well, not so much. What we thought was certain, what we thought we could count on, has been “kicked under the bus.”

Constitutional Chaos

We tend to see American society as a stable institutional structure, ordained by the Constitution. We may see politics as an unfortunate if necessary disturbance of the normal process of constitutional government. Even in these times of administrative disruption of numerous departments and agencies, we believe that the institutions of the nation are rock-solid entities beyond the range of any threat to their existence. We remain placidly comfortable in the Constitution and the institutions it supports as if nothing could change what the founding fathers wrote in it. We see villains pecking at the perimeter, but no real threat.

Whether we are strict constructionists or interpretive relativists, we see the Constitution as a sacred and solid guide to the conduct of government and of citizens. Well, actually, no institution is any stronger than the beliefs and actions of the people who sustain it. The ties that bind an institution together are only as strong as the commitment of the people charged with overseeing its operations. What interests do they have in holding it together as required by the Constitution? What if a president appoints political hacks to cabinet posts or as directors of core federal agencies, who are diametrically opposed to the very mission of those institutions? Well, here we are.

Destructive Deconstruction

We now have plenty of evidence for what happens when a leader intends to “deconstruct” a department or agency. Typically, the appointed leader is “in bed with” the entities that legislation mandates the institution to regulate or prosecute. If so, s/he can do a lot of damage to the mission and morale of its members. Such “leadership” can divert and stifle normal operations and drive dedicated public servants away in despair.

Institutions do not stand alone. They stand only in the values of leaders who believe in them and support employees in carrying out their mandate. Yes, people come and go as members and leaders over the years. Yet in normal times, the structure and purpose remain stable and clear. That is because leaders of variable competence and commitment either drive the institution to greater achievement or do not much get in the way of effective performance.

However, if a president appoints a “leader” to administer an agency or department with the explicit intent to eliminate its function in society by budget constraints, executive orders, or censoring reports, all hell breaks loose. Employees committed to the mandate of their organization will retreat into obscurity to keep their jobs or they will resign on principle. The organization and its mission suffer severely and the destroyers claim victory.

Plunder and Plutocracy Propagate Profusely

Today, a presumptuous president produces an increasingly dysfunctional federal government. His executive appointees are hell-bent on reducing and eliminating any function or operation that does not serve his and his cronies’ economic interests. The plutocratic class of super-rich corporate and financial elites have already benefitted immensely, both financially and politically. They wallow in new freedoms from social and environmental responsibility and from windfall tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

The appointment of Supreme Court justices that favor corporations and the ultra-wealthy over the people and the public interest, assures the continued future strength of the plutocrats. Hence, continued climate denial in the face of overwhelming catastrophic facts. No wonder the Republicans, who are more heavily bribed by the wealthiest of the wealthy than the poorly organized corporate Democrats, faun over the political pretender they initially despised. No wonder they are now so “loyal” to the would-be dictator. Their greed matches his.

Rob Riemen warns us in his brief book, To Fight Against this Age, of the dangers of the new rise of fascism. Timothy Snyder urges us to practice citizenship as argued in his small book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, to avoid falling under the spell of a would-be fascist dictator. These two scholars, one Dutch and one American, sum up the clear lessons of history on how to retain democracy and freedom. We must learn them or lose both.

Rape is a violent crime of domination. Violence, of course, is the ultimate act of domination. We tend to see violence as an act of physical force leading to either physical injury or death, and it often is. But violence can also take on more subtle forms.

Not all domination directly entails physical force. Some forms of dominance involve mental violence. Spousal abuse, as well as sexual harassment, can take social psychological forms involving no physical act. Some forms of abuse consist mainly of “degradation rituals.” Trump is a master of ritual degradation.

Domination often comes under the “color of authority,” whether physically violent or not. When abusers lead large organizations, the result is often institutionalized degradation of whole populations or vulnerable communities. Elites often subject whole classes of victims to exploitation for profit. So-called “authorities” too often exhibit sociopathic tendencies in their “enforcement” of rules, regulations, or laws.

Sociopathy Empowered

Rapists, like all sociopaths, seek to exercise power by any means necessary to control and exploit their victims. Many power-seekers use their aggression to gain social, economic, or political power. It is not surprising, therefore, that a greater percentage of people in positions of authority are sociopaths than in the general population. Bullies typically begin their abuse at an early age.

Whether he is drunk or not, a seventeen-year-old who attempts to rape a fifteen-year-old exhibits sociopathic behavior; he is a rapist. We should not dismiss such bullying as a mere youthful indiscretion. Instead, attempted rape reflects a deep personality disorder that is not likely to change in adulthood.

However, many sociopaths disguise their lack of empathy within aggressive acts once they become executives, jurists, or politicians who have great power over others. Sophisticated bullies often disguise their ruthless exercise of power as the mere execution of legal principals. We can find bullies in all economic classes, of course. But those who rise within economic and political elites pose a far greater danger to society than any street hustler.

Most experts on sociopathy/psychopathy agree that it is not a curable condition. While sociopaths learn to appear to conform to social norms of civility and even kindness, they actually have little or no empathy for others. Some more severe cases engage in ruthless Trumperyand, while they demand absolute loyalty from their associates, they do not hesitate to “throw them under the bus” if that is convenient. We have too many examples of that emanating from the highest political office in the land.

Many sociopaths adapt to their social surroundings by deploying a practiced charm. As a result, they become quite successful, especially if they went to elite prep schools and universities. In such higher social strata, they develop connections with the sons and daughters of other well-connected families, which they use throughout their careers.

The Career Rapist

It is not unusual for men from wealthy families, who have a need to dominate others, to occupy high offices. Such men often cling to a set of political beliefs that reflect their obsessive desire to dominate, disparage, and dismiss the rights of vulnerable minority peoples. They often advocate for laws that oppress minorities (and women) even further. Too often, they have successful careers.

Sociopaths just do not feel whole if they fail to dominate others from groups they see as weaker and therefore undeserving of respect or rights. That is why fascists are also racists and racists have authoritarian personalities so similar to those of fascists. Nor is it particularly surprising that sociopaths, who usually also display elements of narcissism, express their need to dominate by one form of sexual predation or another. Executive power affords so many opportunities for sexual harassment in male-dominated organizations.

Rape of Democracy

Many abusers avoid public exposure for decades. A few, when subject to close scrutiny, such as in a vetting process when nominated for high office, say, Supreme Court justice may be finally exposed. That sends an already corrupt “advise and consent” process into a tailspin with politicians running in all directions for cover.

The accuser is doubly victimized when political allies of the “closet predator” dismiss the claims of a female victim, by using various forms of sexist derision and patronizing innuendo, all while feigning the concern for “giving her a fair hearing.” Anita Hill was the classic victim of such sociopathic politics.

Entrenched politicians see it all as “just politics.” Since many politicians have sociopathic tendencies themselves, those who are allies of the perpetrator rally to his defense using every available discounting and delegitimizing technique they can muster.

In the political realm, when all this happens, another unacknowledged victim of rape is Democracy herself.

Resistance seems necessary, though clearly, it is not sufficient. What will resistance get us, really?

A slower unraveling of American Democracy? Maybe, but not much slower. Democracies die not so much by military coup but by slow erosion of crucial institutions such as the courts and the press. The anti-democratic forces of the corporate state have gathered unprecedented power and the awareness of the people remains dominated by the ideology of industrial-consumerism, reinforced by the rise of extreme demagoguery. We are in the perfect anti-democratic storm.

Perhaps one or two less weather weirdings next year? Probably not. Any slowing of climate chaos is a long-term project requiring massive action now. That is just not happening. The stronger the scientific evidence – even accelerated intensified draughts and epic rainfall, tropical storms, arctic ice-melt, and rising sea level happening now – the greater the political denial. Prior modest U.S. governmental efforts to reduce carbon emissions rapidly wind down as I write.

So Much to Resist, So Few Tools

Maybe resistance can ease the splitting of our society into the extremely rich and the rest of us? Perhaps, but again, such a project faces centrally organized power, massive institutional momentum, and highly leveraged financial control. The concentration of wealth and the plunder of the planet continue unabated. Street protests are mostly catharsis, yet bring on escalated military police arrests and violence.

Maybe resistance could achieve a slight improvement in the deteriorating health of our people due to abridged access to healthcare by the Corporate State. Well, that is not likely in the short run, since it will take a lot more than empty rhetoric by Corporate Democrats if they regain control of Congress. The Dem’s are still beholden to the Wall Street financial elites who want to keep their free ride while the people suffer. What incentive do the Dem’s have to overthrow the monopoly of medical insurance corporations and Big Pharma that feed their campaign coffers? Wall Street and K Street keep them flush, after all.

Well, at least we might hope for a concerted effort to accelerate climate action, right? But again, Mr. Big Corp is likely to be running more hi-tech R&D programs, chasing illusions of “geo-engineering,” possibly the greatest hubris of all. The corporate elite is not likely to accelerate deployment of ready-to-go no-patent-monopoly distributed power generation and energy conservation strategies. Climate-appropriate technologies and policies do not offer monopoly power or vast corporate profits. Those would involve some degree of community control replacing endless corporate-state intermediation assuring further central control and human suffering.

Something Very Different

No, we need something very different now. “But you don’t know what it is, do you Mister Jones?” That is exactly the point today. Humanity has entered uncharted waters and we don’t even know our ship that well. Furthermore, our ship was not rigged for these waters. We are in the Anthropocene and few have even heard the term. Most do not grasp the fact that things really are different now. No political authority has even come close to acknowledging this reality.

Well, I can tell you one thing. What we need even more than resistance is replacement of the industrial-consumer economy and rapid restoration of local and regional ecosystems worldwide. Only then can we create the human resilience that we cannot achieve quickly through national politics or street protests before full-on climate collapse accelerates hyper-weird weather, large scale crop failures, forced migrations, escalated violence and imminent societal collapse.

So, resistance must transform itself if it is to extend its meaning and value beyond mere protest, even massive political protest in the streets. Momentary disruptions of the authoritarian illusions of the political-economic elites (whose denial of reality serves their short term interests) will not measurably improve our chances of re-stabilizing the Earth System as we enter the Anthropocene.

Resistance to the environmental and human destruction of the global industrial-consumer economy can only succeed by transforming itself. Resistance must take the form of positive concrete actions to restore local ecosystems, and by extension the whole Earth system. We must resist by creating viable zero-emissions community economies. In doing so, we will naturally withdraw participation in the giant technosphere that now deeply intermediates all human action in the material world, damaging all life on the planet.

We must take direct community actions to re-establish harmonious relations with our local and regional ecosystems. For example, viable farm-to-table food systems, by their very establishment, resist and diminish giant corporate systems of global intermediation and centralized control of localities. We must eliminate the complex institutional intermediation of every aspect of our lives. Creativity and innovation within communities may become the greatest form of resistance.

Resist we must. But what will that get us, really? Well, catharsis yes. However, that is clearly not enough.

Will resistance bring a slower unraveling of American Democracy? Maybe, maybe not. The deep entanglement of political institutions with the increasingly monopolistic “technosphere” is so extensive that only resistance that borders on revolution might make a dent by forcing contraction of the corporate state. Don’t hold your breath.

Will resistance bring one or two less weather weirdings next year? Probably not. That will take a lot more than resistance. Only major contraction of the techno-industrial-consumer economy coupled with accelerated deployment of low-carbon technology and economics in local communities will make much difference. That will require massive social change at every level.

Limits of Resistance

Will resistance bring a respite from the splitting of our society between the extremely rich and the rest of us? Perhaps a tiny easing, if a new Congress were to legislate big penalties for abuse of the economy by the financial sector and if a new president were to appoint a ‘hard-ass’ to enforce existing anti-trust law. Only then might the parasitic financial sector shrink some. But its penetration into political institutions is deep and pervasive. But how much of the liberal insurgency that is the #resistance just a visceral repulsion to a narcissist sociopath and how much seeks deep social change?

Would resistance bring a slight improvement in the deteriorating health of our people due to abridged access to healthcare? Not likely in the short run, since it will take a lot more than Corporate Democrats controlling Congress to overthrow the Medical Insurance Monopoly and Big Pharma dominance over the forced “markets” mediating medical care. On the other hand, maybe enough resistance could generate the momentum needed to bring on universal health care, so common in the rest of the developed world.

Well, with a lot of resistance, we might at least get a concerted effort to accelerate climate action, right? Again, Mr. Big Corp is likely to continue forcing more capital-intensive hi-tech R&D programs, not accelerated deployment of ready-to-go distributed power generation and energy conservation strategies. Serious carbon emissions reduction, which requires major contraction of the technosphere, would involve seriously greater community control of economic activity, replacing the endless intermediation within the technosphere assuring sustained central control and uninterrupted human suffering.

Something Different: Replacement, Restoration, Resilience

No, we need something very different, and we need it now. “But you don’t know what it is, do you Mister Jones?” Of course, that is a major part of the problem. We are blindly sailing into unchartered waters in a sinking ship with the captain acting the mutineer overloading a private lifeboat with bullion. “Follow the money.”

We will not survive by appealing to existing authority structures or charismatic demagogues. Nor will we survive by separating out ‘recyclables’ while buying plastic-packaged everything and investing in a hybrid car to maintain accustomed fossil-fuel levels of mobility.

Well, I can tell you one thing. What we do need even more than resistance is replacement of the global industrial-consumer economy with local ecological communities. Also we urgently need restoration of ecosystems everywhere to stop the planetary bleeding of the complex of living Earth systems we timidly call “the environment.” Only then can we achieve the resilience we desperately need. We will never get close to resilience by appealing to national politics. We must act now where we live. Of course, that is the hard part.

Resist we must, but it will be far from enough, even if Indivisible, movements like it, and street protests grow much larger. Politicians will continue dickering and taking bribes right up to the point where full-on climate collapse accelerates weird weather events, droughts, floods, large-scale crop failures, forced migrations, escalated violence and imminence of societal collapse.

I just read Chris Hedges’ report in Truthdig of his recent telephone conversation with Ralph Nader. I regularly read numerous sources of information on the politics of Trumpery and the failure of the Democratic Party to respond effectively to the crises facing the nation as Dem’s obsess over the latest Trumpist Travesty, as if wavering minority opposition and easy sarcasm were enough.So, I was surprised that Ralph Nader’s and Chris Hedges’ words hit me so hard.

I have read most of Chris Hedges’ books, so I am used to his dire descriptions of the present state of the American Empire and its domestic disasters. They are accurate and scary. I have also followed for decades Ralph Nader’s incisive expositions on the catastrophic corruption of the U.S. corporate state, and his amazing feats forcing reforms. But somehow this conversation hit far more deeply than the general realities of the “Deep State,” and the appropriation of that term by the “alt right,” such as I wrote about in a recent post here.

White nationalist propagandists such as Steve Bannon, tout the goal of taking down the “administrative state,” by which he seems to mean everything in the federal government not directly controllable by the wannabe dictator in the White House. That includes any federal program or agency that attempts to serve a public purpose rather than the interests of the American Oligarchy. But I digress.

In his conversation with Chris Hedges, Nader expressed a deep pessimism about the political prospects of the nation and the cultural decline of its people. This, after decades of stalwart defense of the public interest in myriad ways, ever dauntless. What is it that so troubles Nader, the unflappable public intellectual-activist? Hope fades for Nader and Hedges’ desire to take down the corporate state in the nation’s defense against the exploitative interests of the oligarchy under which it now operates.

The contrast is instructive. The Bannon-Trump forces would dismantle large elements of the U.S. federal government in order to eliminate operations that protect society from the devastation of neoliberal corporate economic system of extraction, production, consumption and waste. Disaster capitalism indeed! They promote utopian dreams of libertarian individualism as their cover for kleptocratic plunder of the commonwealth.

Nader and Hedges would dismantle something quite different. Their target is the totalitarian political apparatus that manages the nation-state under the thin veneer of a pseudo-democracy in the interests of corporate market liberalism and the kleptocratic oligarchy from which we desperately need to protect society. That, of course, is the far more difficult task.

It is far easier to rile up the growing segments of the population that politics has abandoned while pretending to assist those already downtrodden for generations. The declining white middle and working classes have built up resentment ever since their slide began three decades ago. Trump is exercising the classic tactics of all demagogues throughout history. And conditions were and continue to be ripe for their success.

Hedges quotes Nader’s telephone rant reflecting his despair for American democracy. The litany of converging crises is to long to repeat here. Read it there. We must face the reality he describes and find ways to overcome it. As Hedges reported, “Resistance, Nader said, must be local. First we need to organize to take back our own communities…” Neighborhood by neighborhood is where the power of the people resides. That is where our hope for the nation and our survival will be found.

With the proliferation of digital sources of “information” and technologies of communication, it seems more and more difficult to determine the difference between fact and fakery. Social media allow just about anyone to post outlandish claims and arguments without a shred of evidence. Fake evidence and false logic proliferate. If it is sensational enough or hits a sore spot for many people, a falsehood or an otherwise meaningless meme may “go viral.”

Fakery is not new, but its access to everyone has exploded with the advent of social media. Critical thinking and the weight of evidence are lost in the process. Powerful elites deny any verified fact that conflicts with their economic or political interests. Fossil-fuel industry campaigns of disinformation about carbon emissions, global warming and the extreme weather events they cause follow the model the tobacco industry used in its public relations campaigns to deny the scientific facts lung cancer caused by smoking cigarettes.

Fake News

Almost any news report today is subject to the accusation that it is “fake news.” The term’s recent growth in popularity may have originated when ‘liberals’ accused Fox News of prevarication when its stories were so biased that they did little if any justice to facts. Of course, the prevalence of propaganda has a long history. Fake news is not new, but it grew rapidly as the institutions of traditional journalism were folded into the entertainment divisions of the major networks and print newspaper sales declined.

The blatant false characterizations of “liberals” by Fox New anchors, and extreme right-wing radio “personalities” while their regular misrepresentations of facts drew mockery and ridicule from “liberal Democrats.” The fake news anchors denied the legitimacy of the “Black President,” with the lies that with the help of “The Donald” became known as “the birther movement.” At the same time, corporate interests exploit the resentments and fears of the declining white working and middle classes by funding the extreme politics and racism of the Tea Party movement, which the Republican Party embraced and began calling its “base.”

Fake President

Unsubstantiated claims, rhetorical tricks, exploitation of fears, and outright lies permeate the speech of the Fake President. Cheating and fakery characterized the entire

Image: Northern Sun

business career of the Dangerous Donald. Big lie or small, the Fake President simply repeats falsehoods in the face of publicly verified contrary facts. “Fake President”? Yes. What began as another attempt to gain more notoriety as a “celebrity,” unfortunately resonated with the anger and fears of many Americans. His open pandering to racism, misogyny, and hate brought the neo-Nazis and white nationalists out into the open.

“The system” had destroyed the aspirations of middle and working class white folks through job outsourcing, cultural marginalization, and political indifference. Corporate Democrats and Republicans both contributed to forming the corporate state against the interests of citizens. Each blamed the other for the plight of ordinary people; both were guilty of betraying the people while pandering to wealthy corporate donors. Trumpery arose by effectively exploiting the political chaos of fake democracy.

Fake Congress

Everyone knows that the Congress operates to serve the interests of the biggest corporations and wealthiest individuals, not the people. Senators and Representatives feign concern for the people while taking huge bribes in the form of “campaign contributions.” The Supreme Court abetted their corruption by the fakery of defining corporations as “persons” and allowing unlimited corporate money to influence

Senator Inhofe faking climate denial, with the chance of a snowball in Congress. Washington Post photo.

elections. The Republican Party effectively used unfettered funding to influence elections by various forms of voter suppression and propaganda. They ruthlessly gerrymandered minority voting groups out of electoral influence. Russian bots and trolls abetted the chaos of fakery.

The Democratic Party elite, dependent on large corporate and Wall Street funding, stuck with Hillary, the corporatist candidate, suppressing the booming popularity of Bernie, the independent bearer of the old FDR-liberal policies. The desire of many democrats for a female candidate – the logical follow-up to the Black President – conflicted with the resistance to the corporatist party elite. Resentment resulted in many not voting and some even voting for the Fake Outsider, Trump, the master of demagoguery and economic exploitation.

Fake Experience

However, politics is not everything. It is merely a core driver of the fakery of modern life itself. Fake experience proliferates, from fake adventure (theme parks, staged ‘adventure’ vacations, and video games), from fake meaning in consumerism to fake

The fakery of suburban life, for those who can still afford it, reflects a trained incapacity to live beyond the illusions of the fake domination of nature that characterizes the consumer culture. The real world consists of the complex of ecosystems upon which all of humanity depends, but few recognize for its survival importance. Most remain insulated from real experience.

Revenge of Reality

It is all coming to a head. Reality has a way of eventually forcing itself upon us. We have lost our fake control of our environment, as the laws of physics, chemistry, and bio-systems continue to rule the material world from which we have alienated ourselves.

Growing numbers of people have become aware of their dissociation from reality. They realize at a gut level that the fake realities that digital technology generates are no substitute for the feeling of a warm breeze on a spring day. Reality impinges on illusion.

Growing numbers of IT geeks now carry physical notebooks to write in. Music lovers return to the analog sounds of vinyl records and live music. Children are discovering actual toys again. Who needs a “driverless car”? Smartphones, texting (while not driving), and Facebook are far from disappearing. Nevertheless, reality will continue to insert itself into our abstracted lives and disrupt our digital and social illusions. That is when the denial of reality will dissipate and a democracy grounded in ecological reality will return.

We are so used to the idea that we must each have the freedom to choose, well, just about everything in our lives. We imagine that we are independently constructing a “life of our own.” We have, in our minds at least, an inalienable right to choose and to live our own unique “lifestyle.” That privilege is seen from within the American consumer culture as a fundamental, even constitutional, right of every “consumer.” With the development of consumerism, the idea of “the consumer,” seems to have replaced the concept of citizen. Many people’s understanding of freedom has narrowed considerably as a result.

Democracy, on the other hand, is an inherently social concept; it refers to a people fully engaged in the decisions that affect their collective lives. Humans, like all other living species, are interdependent for their survival and well-being. As individuals become more dependent on the corporate state, the freedom that is made possible by democracy begins to fade.

Freedom to Consume

Our concept of lifestyle is closely related to our consumer behavior; in fact, each seems to embody the other. Our consumer behavior is our lifestyle. The pursuit of consumer lifestyles has itself become the defining element of our “freedom.” It is hard to imagine that this is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind in shaping the Bill of Rights. Political freedom seems to have receded into a background abstraction – another consequence of the ascendency of the corporate state.

Of course, much of our so called “freedom” is actually conformity to some mass-media generated image of our personal uniqueness and “individuality.” Any potential authenticity in that image is transformed by the corporate mass media to maximize consumption, profit, and, incidentally, waste and pollution.

Thorsten Veblen described the status-enhancing behavior of the “leisure class” of the booming U.S. industrial society at the end of the nineteenth century as “conspicuous consumption.”[i] Today, conspicuous consumption is no longer limited to displays of excess by the very wealthy. The ever growing productivity of the industrial system requires mass consumption to generate enough demand for its ever-growing supply of products. The desire for consumption beyond need has to be stimulated for demand to keep up with production. The consumer culture is driven by the need of capital investment to expand production and sales so that principle and interest can be paid back and a profit made. The agent of that culture is mass-media propaganda.

Ultimately, in an endless-growth economy, demand cannot keep up. Nor can the supply of raw materials for ever more efficient production.

Illusions of Freedom, Denial of Necessity

The debt and growth driven economy has no viable boundaries within its own operating model. It admits to no natural or environmental boundaries to its growth. But there are limits to growth on this finite planet and they have been known for decades.[ii] The contemporary dilemma of political economy is of an entirely different order than that framed by conventional economics. We are faced with two directly related imperatives, one economic, the other physical-environmental. The growth economy has reached its natural limit and the expanding consumption of earth’s resources is surpassing the carrying capacity of the planet. Together these two elements of industrial society have come a long way in destabilizing the living earth systems upon which we depend, as well as the climate system upon which their stability depends.

Put aside for a moment the climate deniers — a good idea in itself. Fundamentalist deniers would dead-head us into an earth-bound “end times” in order to retain their faith that only God controls the weather. The more secular deniers won’t give up the corporate largess they enjoy or seek; they are not going to be convinced of scientific facts by rational argument. They want the economic growth of the industrial era to continue forever, or at least while they grab all they can. However, neither the material facts of resource depletion, pollution and waste, nor the climate disruption caused by industrial society will allow continuation on this path. magical thinking cannot overcome the laws of physics nor the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate disruption. Science is not a matter of political opinion or religious fervor.

Ironies of Democracy and Science

The more important issues are found in questions of how to respond to the scientifically verified facts of impending human crisis, knowing their truth. Those facts include a rapidly destabilizing climate, an increasingly unstable overly integrated world financial system, a debt-driven overproducing intolerably unfair corporate dominated economy, and growing cultural chaos and political violence.

Climate destabilization involves an incredibly wide range of variables in an extremely complex system over which humans have had very little control. Diverse human actions, all involving the burning of carbon, inadvertently disrupted that system for two hundred years until the consequences became obvious to those who observed, measured, and analyzed them.

The first major evidence of an impending climate crisis was hidden by the petroleum industry, enabling it to grab a couple more decades of undue profit while the problem grew far worse and now threatens humanity itself. Along the way, it funded large scale climate denying propaganda using the same marketing that the tobacco industry used to delay acceptance of the facts of damaged health from smoking cigarettes. The damage done, however, is global, not just to a single sector of the population.

The scientific ethic of accepting socially verified evidence in the face of prior contrary beliefs has led to countless advances in knowledge and technological innovation. The ability of NASA to land a man on the moon, etc., resulted from the same basic scientific processes that produced the findings of climate science.

Once clear trends from vast amounts of data are confirmed, “theory” is no longer a matter of opinion. The math of verified laws of physics and the evidence of repeated observation that produced aerospace program success were never subject to denial propaganda. And they involved a very focused goal and the development of very specific technologies to achieve it. This allowed an incredibly high degree of control over a very narrow range of variables with highly predictable outcomes. In that respect, climate science is very different. Any attempt to achieve climate restabilization will require the mobilization of entire populations to change their institutions and behavior.

The democratic processes of science have produced knowledge verified by countless data sets and analyses.[iii] Unlike the behavior of nations, those facts are not negotiable. Physics, in that sense, is objective. It is up to humans to respond to reality in a way that improves our chances as the chaos grows. But the formally democratic institutions of the industrial societies have completely failed to take actions to counter the deadly trends we know are occurring. The only chance to overcome the moribund political institutions and achieve the necessary will come from the diverse social movements now building around the world, demanding climate action that goes far beyond COP21 platitudes and international empty promises.

Freedom is Survival

How do we retain our consumerist illusion of unbounded personal “lifestyle” freedom in a new situation that calls for massive social change? We do not. We simply do not have that luxury, even though the corporate state would have you believe you do. If we want to survive without global extreme climate chaos and collapse of society along with the failed-growth economy and climate-destabilized agriculture, we must act collectively and quickly.

Despite the claims that technological innovation within the industrial system can reduce carbon emissions enough to thwart climate catastrophe and all the chaos that entails, only major constraint of industrial production and consumption themselves will be enough. That is not a welcome fact. The power elites are still in denial about the necessity of transformative change, as they seek piecemeal profitable technological fixes. But another way is not only possible, it is undeniably necessary. It must come from people and communities organizing themselves for the change that the large institutions deem impossible. Reorganizing society from the bottom up must happen because the top-down institutions are strangling any serious initiative from the top. This is not a lifestyle choice. Rather, it is the necessity of collectively choosing complex and massive social actions to improve the chances for the survival of our species.

[ii] Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update (New York: Chelsea Green, 3rd ed., 2004), confirms the projections of the 1972 book, Limits to Growth, based on computer models of resource depletion by MIT scientists. Simply put, humanity has overshot the environment’s ability to physically and biologically sustain human life at the scale to which it has grown. This will lead to the collapse of civilization unless radical changes are instituted to reduce the human load on the planet’s carrying capacity.

[iii] The scientific consensus on climate change, while continually being refined, includes some very clear and uncontested trends. Many of these have accelerated faster than predicted. The intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of scientists from around the world, has consistently under-predicted changes. Perhaps that is because its reports are mediated by the nation states that it reports to. The trends are nevertheless clear and increasingly disturbing. Any mitigation efforts that hope to be adequate must also be comprehensive and complex, resulting in significant “lifestyle” changes, mostly in fully industrialized nations where carbon emissions continue to be vastly larger than in non-industrialized regions.